iOS 11 brought a change to the way your app gets positioned on the screen. A reason for this is the new iPhone X, with its ‘notch’ at the top. However, this change affects all iOS devices, not just the iPhone X.

Apple introduced a new parameter for web pages called viewport-fit. iOS devices have a ‘Safe Area’, which is screen space the app can safely use. viewport-fit defines how your app uses the Safe Area. If set to contain (the default) your app will be confined to the Safe Area. If set to cover, it will use the entire screen.

In AppStudio 6.3.0.3 (released today), we have added a new viewportFit project property you can use for your app. It works together with the StatusBar property to define what is on top of the screen.

Let’s look at the various combinations:

StatusBar: black-transluscent viewportFit: contain

This is how many apps will look running iOS 11 with AppStudio before 6.3.0.3. Notice the empty space above the Header? It actually takes the color of your app’s background. The status bar info is there, but invisible since it is white on white.

StatusBar: black-transluscent viewportFit: cover

By changing viewportFit to cover, the app now fills the whole screen. But now the status bar info is showing IN our Header. If you want to use this combination, add 20 pixels on top of the Header for the status bar.

The Christmas Countdown is running, it’s time to wish you happy holidays,
a happy new year and all the best for the future.
What about a scary Virtual Reality experience for Christmas? Dare to watch it at:

While our company is based in Canada, about half of our customers (and some of our developers) are based in the US.

The FCC is proposing to hand control of the internet to the big cable monopolies. They’ll be allowed to charge different rates or throttle network throughput for sites as they please. With little or no meaningful competition, users will have no choice but to pay.

The internet (and ARPANET before it) was designed to be free and open. This is the most serious assault on it so far. If you’re in the US, please contact your congressman to let him know your feelings.

I’ve always kept NSB out of politics – but this proposal can only hurt our customers. It’s important to speak up.

A couple of days ago, one of our users asked a good question on our discussion board: Can Volt’s services be used from a PhoneGap app?

It sounds like a reasonable request. PhoneGap apps are compiled web apps which run as native apps. AppStudio is very good at making these. Volt is a collection of services, including features such as serverStorage, which lets users of your apps easily save or share data on a server.

It turns out it is easy to do and works nicely. You need to do two things:
1. In Project Properties, set the Volt Domain to the location of your app on Volt. For example,storage-introduces-owlishly.volt.live.
2. In Project Properties, add the path of the Volt library to extraheaders. For example:<script src='https://storage-introduces-owlishly.volt.live/api/client/volt.js'>